Someone give Billie Joe a wake up call, because September has wound its way down and made way for October to take the reins. That means it is time for another FYC round-up for the month we leave behind, where we take some of the best offerings from the creative community with us into the new month. As tends to be the case, there was so much great content circulating after the weeks of September swept by that it was hard to narrow it down to the included selections. Here is another look at the communal contributions that we felt deserved another glance.

Inspiration

HDR Photography, you either love it or hate it. I have read comments reflecting both sentiments and honestly I can understand both sides. Here we find beautiful dreamlike colors and tones, almost a magical quality to it.

The 34 logos showcased in the post use punctuation as a design element. Some logos feature commas, colons and semicolons while others use exclamation marks, question marks, brackets and parentheses. I found they were very creative and thought I’d share them with you. Enjoy! :)

As creative people we are always looking for that spark of energy or that person who’s work never fails to get our heads thinking in a new and more creative direction. I have profiled eight people/design groups who I always look towards for inspiration with both product and graphic design.

From time to time, we run into some artists that really catch our attention, and to do that, an artist must stand outside the box, and come up with something entirely fresh and awesome and that’s just what Thomas Doyle did.

He’s been called “the guru of Web page usability” by the New York Times and “the king of usability” by Internet Magazine. Through his Alertbox newsletter and useit.com website, he has been educating hundreds of thousands of web designers around the world since 1995.

Brian Hoff is a one of those folks in the design community that make logo design look effortless. His logos are sleek and elegant. A fantastic acid test for a logo is how well it displays in black and white. Given that Brian’s logo gallery is entirely in black and white, yet looks stunning, I’d say he gets an ‘A’ on that test. Oh yeah, he is also a very good web designer and blogger.

Tomasz Opasinski is from Poland, works in the United States, and has a long history with numerous creative agencies. He’s currently employed as Senior Art Director at BLT & Associates, Inc. He’s mastered Photoshop, digital illustration, design, and continues to experiment whenever time allows.

Vera Oosterhof is an 18 year-old illustrator hailing from Rottum, Netherlands. She attends Minerva: Academy for Arts in the Netherlands, and hopes to pursue a career in graphic design and illustration in the near future. A member of slashTHREE, Oosterhof has strived to create fantastic artwork while maintaining a good reputation in the art community.

Design

The subject of what separates art and design is convoluted and has been debated for a long time. Artists and designers both create visual compositions using a shared knowledge base, but their reasons for doing so are entirely different. Some designers consider themselves artists, but few artists consider themselves designers.

Often times when it comes to preparing files for a printer it can get really complicated really fast. Often times when I’m creating a design there are a lot of elements that I use in a file, most of which are images and fonts. It’s so complicated to remember EVERYTHING you put into a file so I discovered this cool trick you can use in InDesign to help package up all of your information for you!

Development

Here you will find a few Essential Tips to Help You Become A Proficient Debugger, increase the quality of your developing skills, and the knowledge needed to write cleaner and more organized strings of code.

Freebies

With this set we’ve gone for a more refined, Mac OSX style Icons (almost) – which seem to be really popular with web designers recently. We’ve also gone for a (smaller than usual) 32 x 32px size, with a few of them available also at 16 x 16px. The pack includes 178 transparent .png files.

The download of Vilhelmia (Behance Link) comes as a Illustrator file, fully editable as you see fit. It will provide a solid framework for your own remix or use as is. Comes in two styles, solid tint style and graduated tint style.

Freelancing

If you’ve ever thought to yourself this business would be perfect if it weren’t for all of my clients, then this post is for you. We’ll give you a list of tactics that will drive those pesky clients away and quickly lead to your ultimate goal: freelancing failure.

Angie is a freelance web and graphic designer who brings her love of community to the online design collective as co-editor of Fuel Your Creativity. You can view her online portfolio at Arbenting or follow her on Twitter

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